Tom Wolfe Essays

George Plimpton went into training with a professional football team, the Detroit Lions, in the role of reporter playing rookie quarterback, rooming with the players, going through their workouts and finally playing quarterback for them in a preseason game—in order to write was read by people at every level of taste and had perhaps the greatest literary impact of any writing about sports since Ring Lardner’s short stories.But the all-time free-lance writer’s Brass Stud Award went that year to an obscure California journalist named Hunter Thompson who “ran” with the Hell’s Angels for eighteen months—as a reporter and not a member, which might have been safer—in order to write .

The lower class were the journalists, and they were so low down in the structure that they were barely noticed at all.

They were regarded chiefly as day laborers who dug up slags of raw information for writers of higher “sensibility” to make better use of. The first indication I had came in an article in the June, 1966, by Dan Wakefield, entitled “The Personal Voice and the Impersonal Eye.” The gist of the piece was that this was the first period in anybody’s memory when people in the literary world were beginning to talk about nonfiction as a serious artistic form.

Their province was analysis, “insights,” the play of intellect.

They were not in the same class with the novelists, as they well knew, but they were the reigning practitioners of nonfiction....

and, of course, the writers for my own Sunday supplement, , chiefly Breslin, but also Robert Christgau, Doon Arbus, Gail Sheehy, Tom Gallagher, Robert Benton and David Newman.

Physical Science Research Paper - Tom Wolfe Essays

I was turning out articles as fast as I could write and checking out all these people to see what new spins they had come up with.

and Pete Hamill called him and said he wanted to write an article called “The New Journalism” about people like Jimmy Breslin and Gay Talese. Any movement, group, party, program, philosophy or theory that goes under a name with “New” in it is just begging for trouble.

It was late in 1966 when you first started hearing people talk about “the New Journalism” in conversation, as best I can remember. The garbage barge of history is already full of them: the New Humanism, the New Poetry, the New Criticism, the New Conservativism, the New Frontier, il Stilo Novo ... Nevertheless, the New Journalism was the term that caught on eventually. All I knew was what certain writers were doing at Esquire, Thomas B.

This In the midst of it the Kentucky colonels of both Journalism and Literature launched their first attack on this accursed Low Rent rabble at the door, these magazine writers working in the damnable new form... They were better than railroad men at resisting anything labeled new.

The average newspaper editor’s idea of a major innovation was the Cashword Puzzle. Looking back on it one can see that what had happened was this: the sudden arrival of this new style of journalism, from out of nowhere, had caused a status panic in the literary community.